Last Tuesday a reporter from the local paper came to spend 45 minutes to do a story about how we Skyped Celest into class, but now-she-was-able-to-return-and-she-knew-how-things-worked-in-our classroom-because-she-had-been-here-via-Skype. Two hours and 45 minutes later he left. He stayed because he saw students blogging and using our class wiki page and working on more than 20 wiki pages we are making for a local animal park. Today 2 front page stories (Here and Here) came out about what we are doing with technology in our classroom (the reporter explained to me last week that they put the story off until now because it came after a three-day weekend and helped fill the pages on an “off-day”). Actually he did a pretty good job.

I tried to push the web 2.0 story, but that came out as “free software” and didn’t really capture the essence of web 2.0, … but he tried.

The other news story that happened today was that a producer from NBC Nightly News called me to do a story about Celest … but she decided that since our last day is next Wednesday, it was really too late to do a story this school year – she’ll keep us in mind for next fall – Celest has been granted a variance to be in my room next year so that if things don’t go well she can go online with us again.

The way cool news is that representatives from a local cancer support group talked with me last week. They told me that there are over 40 students like Celest in our area and that about 10 of them are at risk students that they would like to support by doing Skype set-ups like we did this year. A computer and web cam at home and one at school. We’ll see where this goes. Hmmm … using web 2.0 to connect students to learning, What a concept!

Learning is messy!